Israel accepts proposal for temporary humanitarian truce

Video: Hamas Refuses Cease-fire Proposal

The Islamic militant group Hamas formally closes the door on the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire aimed at ending the conflict with Israel. Israel is now intensifying air strikes at the Gaza territory. (July 16)

The Islamic militant group Hamas formally closes the door on the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire aimed at ending the conflict with Israel. Israel is now intensifying air strikes at the Gaza territory. (July 16)

Israeli military says it will temporarily halt fire in Gaza for a five-hour humanitarian lull on Thursday.

The military said after contacts with U.N. officials Israel has decided that "between 1000 (0700 GMT) and 1500 (1200 GMT) the Israeli military will cease operational activity with the Gaza Strip and hold its fire".

The appeal was made by a United Nations official, the official said, confirming Israeli media reports, shortly after Hamas rejected an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire to end the nine-day war in which 215 Palestinians and an Israeli have died.

Earlier Wednesday, an Israeli shelling killed four boys on a Gaza beach, a local health official said, and Palestinian militants fired a further 70 rockets into Israel.

Dead on the beach; Rockets keep flying

Ashraf al-Qidra of the Gaza Health Ministry said shelling from an Israeli gunboat off Gaza's Mediterranean coast killed four boys - two aged 10 and the others 9 and 11 - from one family and critically wounded another youngster on the beach.

An Israeli military spokesman had no immediate comment. Netanyahu says the armed forces try to avoid civilian casualties but that militant rocket crews deliberately put non-combatants at risk by operating in densely populated residential areas.

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The rocket volleys from Gaza have a race to shelters a daily routine for hundreds of thousands in the Jewish state. One Israeli has been killed in the rocket fire, most of whose projectiles have crashed on open ground or been intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile shield.

Ahmed Abu Hassera, who witnessed the incident at the shore, told Reuters: "The kids were playing on the beach. They were all ... under the age of 15."

"When the first shell hit land, they ran away but another shell hit them all," said Abu Hassera, whose shirt was stained with blood. "It looked as if the shells were chasing them."

Reacting to the incident, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told reporters in Gaza: "These crimes will not succeed to break our will. We will continue the confrontation and resistance and we promise (Israel) will pay the price for all these crimes."

Earlier, Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip killed at least eight Palestinians, five of them civilians, and a six-year-old boy died of wounds sustained a few days ago, Gaza medics said, raising the death toll in the Hamas-dominated enclave to 208.

Raids and tunnel hunting

Israel urged the evacuation of several districts in the Gaza Strip, home to about 100,000 people, threatening ground operations to try to stem the rocket attacks. The military has said that around 30,000 reservists have been called up since the Israeli offensive began a week ago, with another 8,000 more expected to be called up.

"Failure to comply will endanger your lives and the lives of your family," said a recorded message received by residents of Shejaia and Zeitoun, which sprawl out to the barbed-wire border with Israel

Israeli experts predicted overland raids in the Gaza Strip to destroy command bunkers and tunnels that have allowed the outgunned Palestinians to withstand air and naval barrages and keep the rockets flying.

While tunnel-hunting incursions would be far short of a full-scale invasion and reoccupation of a territory from which Israel withdrew in 2005, it would be a risky and time-consuming mission vulnerable to Palestinian ambushes.

But Amos Yadlin, a former commander of Israeli military intelligence, played down the operational risk to Israel.

"The tunnels cannot be tackled except from the Palestinian side, but they are in relatively uninhabited areas," he said. "We would not have a problem maintaining control. I don't accept the argument that this would be a sinkhole back into Gaza."

Maher Abu Saa'ed, a 45-year-old doctor in Zeitoun, said that with many areas of Gaza under attack, nowhere was safe and he would not leave despite a telephoned Israeli warning to get out.

"To ask hundreds of people to leave their houses and go to the center of the city is insane, a sick joke," he said.

Hamas rejects Egyptian ceasefire

Announcing the movement's formal rejection of the ceasefire plan, Abu Zuhri said: "The outcome of discussions within the internal institutions of the movement was to reject the proposal and, therefore, Hamas informed Egypt last night it apologises for not accepting it."

Hamas leaders have said any Gaza ceasefire must include an end to Israel's blockade of the territory, recommitment to a truce reached in an eight-day war there in 2012 and the release of hundreds of its activists arrested in the occupied West Bank while Israel hunted for three abducted Jewish seminary students.

The three teens were later found dead, and a Palestinian youth was later murdered in what appeared a revenge attack by Israelis. Those killings led to the current bout of hostilities.